1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to receiving documents via email, website and/or custom application programming interface (API) integration, creating corresponding outbound fax jobs and transmitting the outbound fax jobs to the specified destinations. In particular, embodiments of the present invention relate to an improved Internet fax architecture designed for scalability, flexibility and efficient outbound facsimile processing that, among other things, implements a centralized message/work queue within a database, an imaging system load-notification system, a fair queuing system to ensure subscribers have equal access to imaging systems, an outbound resource selection algorithm based on the customer's subscribed capacity and a mass fax interface capability.
2. Description of the Related Art
Existing Internet fax systems have numerous limitations in terms of the scalability and flexibility of their architectures and user-facing flexibility. Existing Internet fax systems have no mechanism to identify image processing resources that are most capable of processing new work and instead rely on a simplistic first-in-first-out (FIFO) methodology to assign outgoing fax requests. While such a FIFO approach is easy to implement, it sacrifices efficiency in connection with image processing resource utilization and can create bottlenecks in outbound fax processing.
Furthermore, the user-facing inflexibility exhibited by existing Internet fax systems results in part from an underlying assumption that a single outbound fax job is associated with a single destination. As such, when a single fax containing the same content is desired to be sent to multiple destinations, customers must submit the fax to the Internet fax system for each destination.
In view of the foregoing and numerous other limitations associated with existing Internet fax systems, a more efficient and flexible architecture that better suits the needs of corporate users is needed.